Luxemburg, Rosa (1871–1919)

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-German Marxist theorist and revolutionary activist. Marx's biographer Franz Mehring called her the best brain after Marx in the socialist movement.

Luxemburg was born to middle-class Jewish parents at a time when Poland was partitioned and occupied by Austria, Germany, and Russia and grew up in Warsaw. Rejecting the nationalism of the Polish Socialist Party, she joined the banned revolutionary Proletariat Party as a teenager. Threatened with arrest, she left Poland in 1889 and became a student at Zurich University in Switzerland, where she remained politically active. Within a few years she had become Proletariat's main theoretician, and in 1894, along with Leo Jogiches (1867–1919), she reconstituted the organization as the Social-Democratic Party of the [Page 880]Kingdom of Poland. Although Luxemburg never returned to Poland to live permanently, she remained the party's theoretical leader until her death.

In 1898, Luxemburg moved to Berlin, joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the largest socialist party in the world, and soon became well known in the labor movement as a speaker and writer. The SPD had been banned between 1878 and 1890 and was formally committed to socialist revolution, but after 25 years of economic expansion, the party had become increasingly reformist in practice. At the time that Luxemburg joined the party, Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), one of its leading theoretical figures, had written a series of articles rejecting many of Marx's central doctrines, in particular the idea that economic crises are an inevitable feature of capitalism, and supporting a gradualist approach to politics. In response to Bernstein's revisionism, Luxemburg wrote Social Reform or Revolution (1898–1899), arguing for the necessity of revolution, which established her as a leading figure on the left of the party. Luxemburg argued that economic crises are unavoidable under capitalism, and that even in liberal democracies, the state acts in the interests of the capitalist ruling class. Luxemburg did not reject the importance of the fight for democratic reforms, but she saw these primarily as fulcrums that the working class could use to organize revolution. Similarly, she supported trade union struggles for better wages and working conditions not because these could by themselves end exploitation, but because if successful they could raise workers' confidence and consciousness. By contrast, she argued not only that Bernstein's ideas could not lead to socialism, but that they would also make it more difficult to win immediate reforms by weakening the workers' movement.

Luxemburg also engaged in a number of important debates with the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). After the split between Lenin's Bolsheviks (majority faction) and the Mensheviks (minority faction) in 1903, she objected to Lenin's conception of a centralized revolutionary party that attempted to organize the most class-conscious workers, with the goal of winning wider layers of the class during periods of political and economic crisis, arguing that it would become bureaucratic and elitist. Lenin and Luxemburg also disagreed sharply over the national question, particularly with respect to Poland. Luxemburg argued that genuine Polish national independence was impossible under capitalism and unnecessary under socialism. Rather than advocating Polish independence, socialists should urge unity between Polish and Russian workers. By contrast, Lenin supported movements for independence in oppressed nations as a way of weakening the imperialist powers and argued that genuine unity between Poles and Russians was possible only if Russian workers acknowledged Poland's right to self-determination.

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